With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe

What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' "America-bashing"? Between the portrayal of East-West relations in the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and the terms of the GATT trade agreements?

In this provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.

Both nations are blinkered by complementary forms of ethnocentricity. The United States--or, more broadly, the Eurocentric West--believes its culture to be universal, while Japan believes its culture to be essentially unique. Thus American critics read and judge Japanese literature by the standards of the Western novel; Japanese politicians pay lip service to "free trade" while supporting protectionist policies at home and abroad.

Miyoshi takes off from literature to range across culture, politics, and economics in his analysis of the Japanese and their reflections in the West; the fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe; trade negotiations; Japan bashing and America bashing; Emperor worship; Japanese feminist writing; the domination of transcribed conversation as a literary form in contemporary Japan. In his confrontation with cultural critics, Miyoshi does not spare "centrists" of either persuasion, nor those who refuse to recognize that "the literary and the economical, the cultural and the industrial, are inseparable."

Yet contentious as this book can be, it ultimately holds out, by its example, hope for a criticism that can see beyond the boundaries of national cultures--without substituting a historically false "universal" culture--and that examines cultural convergences from a viewpoint that remains provocatively and fruitfully off center.

Monotheism is a powerful religious concept shaped by competing ideas and the problems they raised. Surveying New Testament writings and Jewish sources from before and after the rise of Christianity, James F. McGrath argues that even the most developed Christologies in the New Testament fit within the context of first century Jewish monotheism. McGrath pinpoints when the parting of ways took place over the issue of God's oneness, and explores philosophical ideas such as "creation out of nothing" which caused Jews and Christians to develop differing concepts and definitions about God.

Why do the United States and Canada have such divergent political cultures when they share one of the closest economic and cultural relationships in the world? Canadians and Americans consistently disagree over issues such as the separation of church and state, the responsibility of government for the welfare of everyone, the relationship between federal and subnational government, and the right to marry a same-sex partner or to own an assault rifle.

In this wide-ranging work, Jason Kaufman examines the North American political landscape to draw out the essential historical factors that underlie the countries’ differences. He discusses the earliest European colonies in North America and the Canadian reluctance to join the American Revolution. He compares land grants and colonial governance; territorial expansion and relations with native peoples; immigration and voting rights. But the key lies in the evolution and enforcement of jurisdictional law, which illuminates the way social relations and state power developed in the two countries.

Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to readers of sociology, politics, law, and history as well as to anyone interested in the relationship between the United States and Canada.

The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.

Greene examines the ways in which the Guomindang state planned and promoted scientific and technical development both in mainland China between 1927 and 1949 and on Taiwan after 1949. Using industrial science policy as a lens, she shows that the state, even during its most authoritarian periods, did not function as a monolithic entity. State planners were concerned with maximizing the use of Taiwan’s limited resources for industrial development. Political leaders, on the other hand, were most concerned with the state’s political survival. The developmental state emerged gradually as a result of the combined efforts of technocrats and outsiders, including academicians and foreign advisors. Only when the political leadership put its authority and weight behind the vision of these early planners did Taiwan’s developmental state fully come into being.

In Taiwan’s combination of technocratic expertise and political authoritarianism lie implications for our understanding of changes taking place in mainland China today.

A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars.

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino-Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.

A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.